Notae Numismaticae - Zapiski Numizmatyczne (14.2019)

DARIUSZ ROZMUS

250

oraz cieniutkich okrągłych blaszek z otworem w środku. Wciąż trwa dyskusja do-
tycząca ich funkcji.
SŁOWA KLUCZOWE: Młoszowa k. Trzebini, ołowiane „ciężarki”, wczesno-
średniowieczne stanowiska archeologiczne na obszarze zagłębia hutnictwa srebra
i ołowiu, pogranicze śląsko-małopolskie
Early medieval lead weights make up a category of artefacts that have been
found in Central Europe and Scandinavia.1 They appear in various archaeological
contexts, and the function they served has been interpreted in many different ways.
To date, however, they have not been adequately described or catalogued. From
melted lead, a great deal of weights in various shapes were produced. Most of these
have holes, which may have been used to group the weights into bunches. We know
of ring-shaped weights, conical weights, and barrel-shaped (cylindrical) weights.
They have also taken the form of billets or even very thin round plates with a hole
in the center, ones with a weight of 1.9 g.2 It needs to be emphasized that in rare
circumstances artifacts in this category may be mistaken for lead shots.
Kazimierz Wachowski has rightly observed that there is no definition of the concept
of a “weight” in the archaeological literature, nor, in keeping with this, do we have
a list of characteristics that would allow us to differentiate weights from the entire
group of similar objects.3 It is the opinion of the author of the present article that this
term should be understood such that a “true” weight is used mostly (with an emphasis
on mostly) as a weight. To take an example, weights that have neither a hole nor
a handle (for example, iron weights encased in bronze) cannot be used as sinkers.
The kind of weight that we are concerned with in this article, that is, an artifact with
holes or handles, can be a sinker, but - if its weight is correlated with the units of
weight in use at a given moment in history - it can also be used as a commercial weight.
The weights in this article (Tables 1 and 2) come from the village of Młoszowa,
which is near Trzebinia (Plate 3) in Lesser Poland Voivodeship. Młoszowa is located
near an area that has been recognized over the last twenty years as an early medieval
(early Polish) district of silver and lead metallurgy. It was located in the borderland
of present-day Lesser Poland and Upper Silesia.4 These weights are further examples
of the artefacts of this type that have been announced and published within the last
ten years. This group includes both stray finds (Malinowice, Psara District;5 Kuźnica

1 JANKUHN 1943: 189, 192; SZAFRAŃSKI 1948: 93.
2 ROZMUS 2014: 216, ill. 208.
3 WACHOWSKI 1974: 173.
4 ROZMUS 2004: 301-315; IDEM 2014; IDEM 2016b; GARBACZ-KLEMPKA and ROZMUS 2015:
17-20.

Polish Archaeological Record, Working area 95, site 49. ROZMUS 2016a: 263-274.